The Little Girl
by MoneButterfly
Summary: Emily asks JJ why her sister killed herself and here is her answer: Cecilia Jareau was keeping a dark secret in order to protect her baby sister.


The Little Girl

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><p>Summary: Emily asks JJ why her sister killed herself and here is her answer: Cecilia Jareau was keeping a dark secret in order to protect her baby sister.<p>

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><p>Emily and JJ were sitting by themselves on the plane, away from everyone else. JJ was being unusually quiet. She just sat staring out the window at the dark night sky and her quietness was worrying Emily a bit. She tilted her head to the side and asked, "Are you okay?"<p>

JJ sighed and kept looking out as she answered Emily, "I wish I could see the stars. My sister used to love the stars." She looked at Emily. "Sometimes when we were kids she would sit out on and a bench all night counting the stars over and over again."

Emily gave her a sad smile. "How old were you when she died?"

"I was 11. Cecilia was 17," she said and looked back out the window.

Emily thought about whether or not to ask her next question, but then she did. "Do you know why she did it? Why she killed herself?"

With her eyes still fixated and the night sky on the other side of the window, JJ started telling her a story. "Once there was this little girl…"

/

_Once there was this little girl with long blonde hair and pretty blue eyes. She loved her teddy bear, her pacifier and her daddy. Most of the time the pacifier was on a shelf in the kitchen cupboard since the little girl was starting pre-school soon and she should not be using a pacifier anymore. The little girl loved to play with her father. They played tag, blind man's puff, hide and seek and a lot of other fun games._

_One day the father caught her arm and carried her down the basement steps. They were going to play a new game, he said and the little girl was looking forward to it. The father turned on the light in the basement. It was just a light bulb that was hanging over a work desk. It was red and the little girl thought that the red light was the prettiest she had ever seen._

_"Hide so I can't find you," he said and smiled at her. The little girl quickly ran away to hide between old furniture and boxes. She squealed delighted. The little girl was allowed to hide many more times, but the father would find her. And every time he would pull up her dress and kiss her on the stomach. The little girl laughed loudly, because she thought his beard tickled._

_The father was sweaty when he at last grabbed the little girl around the waist and walked with her to the work desk and laid her on it on her stomach. He pushed her dress up and pulled down her panties. He had a hand over the little girl's mouth, because she had become scared and had started crying. He held his hand so that it also covered her nose and she could not breathe. So he moved the hand, but when the little girl again started resisting and crying, then he again covered her mouth and nose with his hand. Finally the little girl learned to be quiet._

_Instead the little girl laid still and looked at the red light bulb. She was lying almost lifeless and in both hands she held a yellow pencil. It was like everything hurt and it kept hurting for many days._

_The mother talked to her girlfriends about why the little girl was hurting and they came with many different suggestions and advices, but the little girl kept hurting for years to come._

_In the basement the little girl tried to make herself invisible. She prayed to God and said magical words, but the father always found her. Nothing helped; she could not make herself invisible, so a couple of years later the little girl instead decided that she wanted to die. When he let her go again, she would die, she promised herself. The thought comforted her, but then one day her parents told her something, something that would change everything. She was going to have a baby sister._

_/_

_She loved her sister even more than the sun, the stars and the teddy bear. When the sister was going to be baptized, then the little girl got to wear the most beautiful white dress she had ever seen. Her mother had spent every night in many weeks to sew it. So the Sunday, when the sister was getting baptized, everything was great. Her mother and father were both proud to show off both of their pretty daughters, and the little girl was proud to show off her sister, but also the white dress._

_The baptizing passed by quietly like the baby had learned not to cry. Later after the food had been served the little girl had been allowed to go for a walk with her sister in her pram. By the way her name was now Jennifer. The little girl walked all the way up to the end of the road where the play ground was to brag about her sweet baby sister. While she told the baby everything she thought a baby sister should know, but she kept quiet when she almost told her about the things she was not allowed to tell anyone about. "I will always protect you," she whispered to Jennifer instead._

_When she had shown off her sister to all the children at the playground she remembered that she had only been allowed to be away for a moment. With her heart beating fast in her chest from fear she hurried back to their house, but her parents seemed like they had more important things to deal with then keeping an eye on their two girls. Therefore the little girl took the opportunity and asked if she could go back to the playground. Her mother just nodded and kept talking with a man with a big moustache._

_Happily the little girl danced down the road, because she really wanted to show as many children her beautiful white dress as she could. At the playground she sat and sang, because she was happy and carefree like all children should be._

_Later that afternoon there was a boy that yelled, "Look, there comes the weird man!"_

_The little girl stood up and got embarrassed. It was her father, who was coming to get her. They walked back to the house hand and in hand, but they did not walk through the front door. Instead her father led her to basement. At that time the little girl had already started thinking about the sun, the stars and her teddy bear._

_A little later the little girl walked up from the basement and into her mother in the kitchen. When the mother saw that the white dress was not as white as it had been anymore, then she yelled, "God damn it! You have gotten dirt all over it, you disgusting brat!" She pulled her daughter out into the bathroom and ripped the clothes of her body and then flushed her with ice cool water. The little girl said nothing. Neither did she say anything when her mother spanked her multiple times. And she did not cry, because she learned not to a long time ago._

_The mother dragged her with her and more or less threw her into her bed. The little girl almost hugged the life out of her teddy bear, but the mother ripped it from her arms and took it with her when she left the room. The little girl pulled the duvet over herself, so it almost covered her head. Her entire body was sore, but she chose not to feel it. So she started whispering to the bear, even though it was not there, about the beautiful Sunday in June, when her beloved baby sister, Jennifer, had been baptized. She told it how she had looked like a princess in her white dress. She got quiet when she thought about how her mother had ripped the dress apart in rage and she also left out the part about the basement, because she wasn't allowed to tell anyone about that._

_For a long time she lay shaking in her bed, because this time her father had not said that he would kill her dog. Instead he had told her that if she did not keep their secret, then he would do to her sister as he did to her. The thought scared her and she hugged the duvet close to her body for a long time and then all of a sudden it was night with her not even noticing it. She looked up at the night sky and smiled happily when she saw that she could see the stars. She started counting them and when she finished just started counting them again. The stars were often counted many times before the little girl at last could fall asleep._

_The next morning everything was as it used to be. The mother was standing with her back to the little girl as she made breakfast. Even though she could only see her mother's back the little girl knew that she was annoyed, but then again most of the times that was all she saw. While the little girl looked at her mother's back her father walked up to her and pressed a coin into her hand, then he lay a finger on his lips as if telling her to be quiet, but what the father did not know was that every time he gave the little girl a coin she had buried it in the backyard between the same two apple trees. The person who someday found them would be rich._

_When the little girl got older she one day thought, while she was burying a coin that if she had kept all the coins she had gotten over the years instead of burying them, maybe she could buy the dollhouse she really wanted. It would not have mattered, because the little girl had stopped playing a long time ago._

_/_

_A warm day in August the little girl had to celebrate her parents' wedding day and a lot of people had been invited. The mother had sewed pretty white dresses for both of the girls. Jennifer had been excited, but the little girl did not like white dresses._

_As the party went on, the children were allowed to play soccer on the road outside the house. There all the children played for many hours, but not the little girl. She just sat on the sidewalk and smiled while she looked at her sister. Jennifer was not very good at hitting the ball, but she still thought it was a fun game and kept laughing happily as she ran after it._

_Later in the afternoon the father came out to get both of them, the little girl thought when she saw, but he only took her sister with him. The little girl wondered why as she watched them walk away, but then a thought quickly entered her mind and it made her afraid. She started running after them and caught up to them then the father was about to bring her beloved baby sister down the basement steps. The little grabbed a spade that was leaning against the railing and swung it with a sudden power no little girl have. She hit the father in the back, so he lost balance and fell down the stairs. He almost pulled Jennifer down with him. The little girl only looked at the father for a second, then she helped her sister up and they walked back to the house. Jennifer cried, because she had hurt her knee, not because of what had happened. She was too little to understand that._

_The mother sat a band-aid on Jennifer's knee and comforted her with such love like the little girl rarely seen her do, but they did have guests today._

_A little later the little girl, her sister and all the guests heard the mother scream outside. The guests all ran out to see what was wrong and everything was chaos. A little later, the little girl could hear an ambulance, but she did not feel anything. Instead she comforted her little sister, who had started crying. Everything that was happening was scaring her._

_The day after Aunt Katherine moved in and had long conversations with the mother. The mother cried when she was not yelling at her two girls. Three days later, the girls were told that their father was dead. So again the mother started sewing dresses for her two daughters on the sewing-machine. Once in a while she would take a break and drank schnapps right from the bottle. The mother sewed black dresses. Thank God, the little girl thought, because she really did not like white dresses. The little girl's father was then buried like the coins that lay between the two apple trees in their backyard._

_The mother continued drinking schnapps for a couple of months, and Aunt Katherine came to get the little girl and her baby sister. The little girl remembered this day for a long time, because this day was the start of her childhood._

_Aunt Katherine was on many ways different from her mother, but at the same time, the same. The aunt also sewed dresses for them, but luckily the dresses were never white. Aunt Katherine took good care of both girls, so much that the little girl one day felt like her important job had been taking away from her - protecting her sister. To begin with it felt strange, because now the little girl had time to play. She just could not remember how to. Instead she tried fill the emptiness with day dreams in attempt to escape reality._

/

JJ turned to look at Emily. "But she couldn't escape. She couldn't forget the thing our father did to her." First one tear ran down her cheek, then another and another till she was sobbing silently into her hands. Emily quickly got up from her seat and sat down beside JJ and wrapped her arms around her. She held her tight as JJ kept crying. When her sobs died down, JJ pulled away from Emily and wiped the tears of her cheeks. "I don't know why it still makes me cry. It was so long ago."

"It's okay to cry about something like that," Emily said giving JJ a sad smile and moving a piece of hair behind her ear. "Your sister was a very brave girl."

"Cecilia kept me safe. She protected me against our father, made sure he didn't touch me." She looked at Emily. "She didn't mean to kill him. She just wanted him to leave me alone."

"I know. Cecilia did what she had to, to protect you."

JJ nodded and her eyes felt with tears again. "But I still needed her to protect me. I was only 11 years old. I still needed her! Why did she leave me with no one to protect me?"

Emily pulled JJ into a hug when she started crying again. She stroked her hair trying to comfort her. "We will protect you. We will always be there for you. You know that, right?"

JJ nodded and leant her head on Emily's shoulder closing her eyes. She knew the team would always be there for her, protecting her. They had been since she came to the BAU, but no one had ever protected her like her sister had.


End file.
